1. Technical Field
Recently, digital cameras are rapidly becoming popular in general household. The digital cameras enable easy image capturing and deletion compared with film cameras of a previous type. The memory card capacity is increased in the digital cameras, and a single piece of memory card is capable of storing 100 or more pieces of photos so that users tend to take a larger number of photos in one use.
2. Related Art
For storage of the resulting larger number of photos, used are an HDD (hard disk) of a personal computer, a photo storage provided with a large-capacity HDD, or others.
As such, the users tend to take 100 or more pieces of photos in one use, if they frequently use their digital cameras, the resulting number of photos may reach a few thousand in a year. To find any specific photo from such a huge pile of photos, there needs to use photo album editing software, or properly and always organize photo storage folders.
The problem here is that constantly organizing folders as such requires the users' efforts, and as the pile of photos gets bigger and bigger, the users may find it suiting to their needs if they can easily find any specific photo from the pile with less effort.
To solve such a problem, there are several methods of finding any specific photo from a large number of photo images by a keyword search. As an example, in Patent Document 1 (JP-A-2002-344721), an image capture device is provided with a keyword button so that any specific keywords can be appended to photo images.
As another example, in Patent Document 2 (JP-A-2000-101894), a plurality of images are grouped, and the resulting groups are each collectively provided with a comment in photo album software or others. These reduce users' efforts of appending keywords to images, but requires efforts of additionally providing comments at the time of capturing or organizing photos.
As still another example, in Patent Document 3 (JP-A-2003-303210), an event information database is provided to skip the procedure of keyword provision to photo images, but this method raises a problem of how to organize and update the event information database.
With such previously-known methods, there problematically requires efforts of additionally providing comments at photo capturing and organizing.
Considered here is information accumulated on a continual basis by individuals for their own, e.g., online diaries called Web logs, or mail exchange on personal computers. Such information includes a large amount of text data about users' activities, including information about date or others.